President Trump unilaterally shut down the federal government for 35 days to demonstrate his displeasure with the refusal of Congressional Democrats to provide funding for the border wall that was the centerpiece of his election campaign. Now that the shutdown is over, impartial experts looking at court records made an ironic discovery: the President's fit of pique allowed more than 80,000 undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.
Removal hearings are frequently scheduled months or even years in advance. The current backlog of cases requiring a hearing is over 800,000. When the system becomes plugged by an event, such as the government shutdown, the canceled hearings cannot simply be rescheduled for a week or two after the shutdown ends. Many cases must be rescheduled for months, if not years, in the future. The immigrants whose cases were necessarily rescheduled have, in effect, been allowed to remain in the country without any documentation for months or years.